Three Songs for Benazir

This documentary portraits the wounds and the despair in a country where war has been dominated for decades.

But nonetheless, it also sketches beautifully the innocence, love, ambitions, dreams and vulnerability of the young Afghan generation that is overshadowed by the clouds of war..

Heartbreaking but beautifully captured.

This is a 22 minute documentary that briefly tells an ordinary love story of an Afghan couple that was displaced by the American invasion. The husband struggles to find work-he tries to join the Afghan army-and various other struggles in life. Despite its shortness the love between the husband and wife come through in stark terms. As does the sheer struggle their lives have been-the film is not political but it's hard to not see the American failure made manifest in this film.

Jesus I hope they are still alive. Americans need to think long and hard before we use the military ever again.

The movie itself is beautiful - a concise portrait of broken hopes, ending in an ultimately resilient note of fighting against an additional adversity: addiction. Shaista has an innocent, cheerful twinkle in his eye that becomes duller over time, until we see him a "grown" man. Grown into accepting his circumstances, into abandoning his youthful dreans. For all of us who grew in the Global South, the portrayal feels real beyond words.

But there's one thing I can't get over, and it's the fact that the movie and its producers don't serm to have made it a point to actually help Benazir and Shaista. It's one thing to record their troubles as faithfully as possible, without intervening, but was it necessary to keep them in obscurity after the film came out? The official website for the movie doesn't even profile them, or offer any ways to help them out. There's no GoFundMe, no mention of what happened to them after the film, not enough credit to them as the living, breathing protagonists of this story.

I don't know about Shaista and Benazir, but if I had a movie made about how difficult my life is, and that movie got all the way to the Oscars, and that success didn't make my life a bit easier at least, I'd feel cheated. Their reality was shared, but was it improved? It certainly was improved for the makers of the film, and so it should have been for its subjects. I'm not sure if they helped them in ways not shown in the documentary, but from what is visible they could have done much, much more. Otherwise this film takes a prentended tone of impartiality that just feels outright exploitative.

Where are Benazir and Shaista, whose voices and faces were seen accross the world; whose story was sold and rented, now?

What a warm and expressive face he has. I was very moved, and loved them both. Wish the film were longer and that we could know how they are doing today. They put faces to my worries during the years we were there and after we left Afghanistan.

I wish it was longer and provided more depth about the four year lapse but still captured the beauty of love, the cruelty of the war, the hope of a family through the eyes of a small family. Little boy's tiny hand holding his dad's finger and those bare feet are so dramatic. Hope they have a happy ending.